The exemplary embodiment relates to enhancing workplace performance and the motivation of individual agents and finds particular application in connection with a system and method for forming contextualized competitions in a work environment, such as a call center.
Call centers commonly use gaming techniques to motivate agent performance in the workplace. These games take the form of challenges or competitions which act as a more interactive alternative to activity-based compensation models and performance management strategies for motivating agents. Activity-based compensation models, for example, allow for individual agent performance to be measured but at the same time do not provide contextual information regarding overall call center performance. Properly designed games have the potential to motivate individual agents while also taking into account the performance weakness and strengths of the entire call center.
The games currently employed by call centers are designed to drive performance according to particular performance metrics or services according to organizational requirements. Because the particular performance metrics and/or services are not changed on a regular basis, the games tend to target the same skill set and consequently the same subset of agents tends to win. Those agents outside of the winning subset may perceive the game as unfair and believe that they do not have a realistic chance to win. Current games are also not implemented in a technological manner. Game scoreboards are typically wall displays that are not updated frequently. Both agents and supervisors lack dynamically updated displays which are beneficial to for enhanced situational awareness and engagement between call center agents and supervisors.
Various methods have been proposed for modeling and simulating activities in call centers for the purposes of call routing, staffing, lesson assignment, and scheduling. Some of these methods include calculating performance metric data indicative of agent performance and studying data correlations. A review of how a call center environment may be gamified by using games and virtual worlds is found in Reeves, B., and Read, J. L., “Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete,” Harvard Business Press (2009). However, mechanisms for providing more dynamic, engaging competitions, or those which may take into account regularly updated performance metric targets are still needed.
There remains a need for a system and method for forming contextualized competitions in a work environment which can lead to improvements in overall workplace performance and the motivation of individual agents.